This specification describes technologies relating to question and answer services.
Traditionally, the basic paradigm in information retrieval has been the library. While this paradigm has worked well in several contexts, it ignores an age-old model for knowledge acquisition, which we shall call “the village paradigm”. In a village, knowledge dissemination is achieved socially—information is passed from person to person, and the retrieval task consists of finding the right person, rather than the right document, to answer a question.
In a library, people use keywords to search, the knowledge base is created by a small number of content publishers before the questions are asked, and trust is based on authority. In a village, by contrast, people use natural language to ask questions, answers are generated in real-time by those in the community, and trust is based on intimacy. Real-time responses from socially proximal responders tend to elicit (and work well for) highly contextualized and subjective queries. For example, the following question is better answered by a friend than the library: “Do you have any good babysitter recommendations in Palo Alto for my 6-year-old twins? I'm looking for somebody that won't let them watch TV.”